ByteVibes

“Some say they’re never interested but many look at them a lot,” Lionel Dangoumau says. “They tease each other in the dressing room: ‘Have you seen you got a bad rating?’ Or, ‘You got a good rating — what did you do with them to get that?’”

Dangoumau is French newspaper L’Equipe’s editor-in-chief of football and he’s talking about one of the most emotive and contentious topics after a match: how well a player performed and what mark out of 10 they should be given by the journalists covering the game.

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If you think that footballers aren’t bothered about this kind of thing and that it’s only supporters who argue about player ratings, think again. David Beckham once rebuked a journalist from the Manchester Evening News for giving him 6/10 following a Manchester United game against Leeds United, and his relationship with the paper was never quite the same.

Then there is the story about the former Sunderland player who only agreed to a post-match interview on the proviso that he got a good mark the next day. From his point of view – and this gives an insight into how some players think – the rating was important to him, because it was something that his friends and family always looked out for after a game.

When Stephen Carr played for Tottenham Hotspur two decades ago, he was amazed how preoccupied some of his team-mates were with the mark out of 10 they got for their performance. “There’s no point getting an eight by a reporter when you think you didn’t play well and the manager thinks you’re bang-average,” former Republic of Ireland full-back Carr told The Athletic last year. “But the lads were so into it. Monday morning, you’d see some players and they’d be looking at that and seeing what they got. Some players are quite affected by it.”

N’Golo Kante only got 3/10 as France won the 2018 World Cup final

Even now, in the social media age, players are still interested in finding out the ratings they have been given by journalists who regularly cover their matches.

“No one wants to admit that they look at it, but everyone looks at it,” one current Premier League player, choosing to remain anonymous, tells The Athletic. “I look at it and see how I’ve been rated. It’s probably an insecurity: ‘Was I good or wasn’t I?’ You know the answer to that, but you just want to hear the general consensus.”

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He chuckles and shakes his head at what he is about to say next.

“It can almost change your opinion on your own performance. There’s times when I’ve come off and thought, ‘I wasn’t at my best’, but we might have won the game. And the guy giving me the ratings could have given me a seven. I could be getting text messages off people if it was a three o’clock game and they couldn’t watch it (on TV), saying, ‘Sounds like you did really well’. So it can put a positive spin on when you know, deep down, that you were crap on the day.”

Grading a player’s performance is, of course, highly subjective and all about perception. On top of that, some publications are far more critical than others. In the case of L’Equipe, the daily sports paper feels like the equivalent of the world’s strictest teacher marking your homework.

“We put a scale in the paper each weekend,” Dangoumau explains. “‘Ten-perfect, 9-exceptional, 8-very good, 7-good, 6-sufficient, 5-average, 4-insufficient 3-bad, 2-very bad, 1-catastrophic’. We hardly ever give a zero. It’s more for non-sporting behaviour — if someone threw a punch, for example.”

It feels like L’Equipe rarely gives a high mark, too. Indeed, Erling Haaland became the only player in history to get 10 out of 10 twice in the same season for his five-goal display in the 7-0 win over RB Leipzig in the Champions League last 16 and after a hat-trick and two assists in the 6-3 victory over Manchester United in October. His is very much a rare case. The publication’s ratings are renowned for being harsh and unforgiving. Even after a hat-trick in the 2022 World Cup final, Kylian Mbappe scored 9/10, while Lionel Messi, crowing his storied career with another stellar performance, two goals, a penalty in the shootout and the trophy that had eluded him until the age of 35, scored 8. As Ashley Williams discovered at the 2016 European Championship when, as Wales captain, he was given 3/10 for the first two group games, a win over Slovakia and a last-gasp loss to England — much to the amusement of his team-mates.

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“There was a bit of a running joke, ‘They’re on Ash again!’” Joe Allen, the Wales midfielder, told The Athletic, last summer. “I’m sure they were still critical of him when we won 3-0 (against Russia, in the third group game). He was probably thinking, ‘I’ve scored (as they beat Belgium in the quarter-finals) and I’ll still get a shit rating!’”

Perhaps Williams will feel slightly better knowing Lionel Messi got the same rating as him (3/10) after he made little impression for Paris Saint-Germain against Real Madrid in the first leg of their last-16 Champions League tie last month.

Others have fared even worse, including Chelsea and US forward Christian Pulisic, who was given a 2/10 for his showing against Real Madrid in this week’s Champions League. Hat-trick hero Karim Benzema only got a 9/10 (more on those elusive 10s later).

Mauro Icardi was given 2/10 after PSG lost to Manchester City in the Champions League semi-finals last season, while Casemiro found himself in the “catastrophic” category when his Real Madrid side were defeated 4-1 by Ajax at the Bernabeu to get knocked out of the same competition in 2019. Nobody is spared, not even French players on the day that they won the World Cup final in 2018 – N’Golo Kante got 3/10 for his performance in that 4-2 victory over Croatia.

Why is L’Equipe so hard to please? “For a player to have a good rating, he really must have had a good game,” Dangoumau explains. “We’re demanding with the players. If a player scores a goal, he’s not necessarily going to get an eight. It’s more complicated than that.

“Some consider that the level of the opponent is important. If you play a weaker opponent, you can’t have too high ratings, because it’s too easy. Others say that the mark should be based on the individual performance aside from the other parameters: was the match easy? Is he a big or average player?”

Most of PSG’s outfielders only got 6/10 despite scoring seven against Celtic in 2017

Although L’Equipe’s reporter at the stadium generally has the final word when it comes to player ratings, there are times when one of the editors will question whether the mark out of 10 they filed is fair, especially if they have watched the same game on television and came to a slightly different conclusion.

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Messi against Real Madrid in that first leg was a case in point. “We discussed it (the 3/10 mark) with the reporter in situ. We didn’t necessarily agree,” Dangoumau adds. “All the players like Messi or (Cristiano) Ronaldo, we expect something. Given all that he has achieved in his career, we expect a certain level of performance from him, which is perhaps higher than other players — that’s up for discussion, I don’t completely agree with that.

“‘Insufficient’ is a four. If he’s ‘insufficient’, and on top of that he misses a penalty… if (Kylian) Mbappe hadn’t scored, that missed penalty could have perhaps been elimination for PSG (as it happened, they were knocked out in the second leg — losing 3-2 on aggregate). So missing a penalty lowers his rating even further. But perhaps his mark is a four. If it’s a five… there are arguments for one or the other — it’s the reporter who feels it in the moment.”

It is the footballer, though, who feels it afterwards.

There are plenty of examples of players complaining about ratings, or comments made about them in match reports.

A personal favourite is the tale of the former Nottingham Forest centre-back who challenged a journalist to a race across the stadium car park after he had been criticised for a lack of pace.

Although it is easy to make light of a low rating, some players are genuinely upset to see one next to their name, especially if they believe it to be unfair. There is a sense of personal embarrassment and, in some cases, anger too. Not every journalist will get away with the excuse — and, believe it or not, this has been used at times — that the six next to the player’s name was accidentally printed upside down and should have been a nine.

Some players will let it all go over their heads, but others want an explanation. “They’ve come to see me when they get a bad rating, or they send me a text,” Dangoumau adds. “They didn’t understand. ‘Why did you give me that mark? That’s not fair. I didn’t do that. It’s not true’.

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“A bad rating can unsettle and hurt a player. For journalists, if there are comments saying, ‘Your article is rubbish’, it’s not nice. You have to be aware of that. When we give a player a poor rating, it’s never (just) a flippant remark and then, ‘Too bad for him’. But, after all, they’re professional players who are judged — it’s part of the job.”

There is, of course, a flip-side to all the negativity about player ratings — something that Lars Windfeld, a former Danish goalkeeper, is well qualified to talk about.

Windfeld, now 59, is one of only 13 players to have been given 10/10 by L’Equipe across more than 40 years, and it doesn’t take long in his company to realise that everything about the game in question — a UEFA Cup tie between Aarhus and Nantes — is ingrained in his mind.

Never mind reeling off the date of the match as if it took place yesterday (September 30, 1997), Windfeld can still remember how comfortable the beds were at the 14th-century French castle where the Aarhus players stayed beforehand. He slept like a king and played like one too.

Aarhus won 1-0 on the night to go through 3-2 on aggregate, after Windfeld made save after save, including an improbable stop in the closing minutes that still makes him smile. “For some reason, we had one of those days where if someone had asked us to walk across the river, we might have been able to do that as well,” he tells The Athletic, laughing.

In a way, his own achievement looks even better over time, mindful that it took 13 years for L’Equipe to give another player 10/10 — and that person just so happened to be Messi. “Looking at the list, with players that everybody admires: Messi, Neymar, Mbappe, (Robert) Lewandowski, and then a guy from Denmark, it’s kind of surreal,” Windfeld says.

In what feels like a sign of the times back then — the internet was in its infancy in 1997 and Twitter nowhere to be seen — Windfeld didn’t even find out he had been given a perfect 10 by L’Equipe until a fortnight later.

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“A couple of weeks passed and then I was called by an agent who had seen the match and he asked if I had any interest in going abroad. I told him I was definitely interested,” Windfeld explains. “Then he asked me my age and I said that I was 35. He said, ‘Ah, OK… it’s going to be a little tough’, I said, ‘I understand that’. He said, ‘By the way, did you know that you got 10/10 in L’Equipe?’ I had no idea.”

Luis Suarez’s return to Anfield in 2019 saw him given a 2/10

Windfeld smiles when asked whether he has kept a copy of the edition with his rating as a souvenir.

“I don’t have the newspaper — I actually tried to buy it on eBay,” he says. “But I wrote a letter to L’Equipe and they sent me the front page of the newspaper of October 1 (the day after the game). I’m not in a picture on the front, but we are mentioned with the 1-0 win, and then they sent me the list of the names of the players (who have been given 10/10). I framed that into the same picture and it’s hanging on the wall.”

As well as Windfeld played in north west France that evening nearly 25 years ago, some would argue that there is no such thing as perfection in a football match. “It’s true,” Dangoumau says. “We give few 10s. We have given more in the last five years than in the 40 years before. But perfection doesn’t exist — even (Zinedine) Zidane in the 1998 World Cup final.

“The last example of a 10 was Alban Lafont, the Nantes goalkeeper, against PSG (in February). He conceded a goal, there are things perhaps that he didn’t do well. But he showed all his talent, his class, with his saves. There was so much emotion in the match. It was a big surprise.

“You can’t be too restrained or measured. There are moments where emotion counts too — what you feel, what the player makes you feel. If it’s really exceptional, it needs to be rewarded. Saying that, I know it’s totally subjective. There will be people who will say, ‘That’s not a 10 because he conceded, he missed a pass, it’s a nine’. Another will say, ‘No, considering the game he had, it’s a 10’. Debates will go on.”

In 2002, Aki Riihilahti, who was playing for Crystal Palace and Finland at the time, decided to turn the tables on football reporters.

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Riihilahti helped Palace beat Ipswich 2-1 away on the weekend, then bought every national newspaper on Monday morning, looked up their reports on his match, and graded each journalist’s work out of 10.

“Sometimes it was hard to believe that I was reading about the same game,” Riihilahti wrote in the column he had in The Times back then. “I was a bit confused about what to think or who to believe. Of course, football is subjective and every pair of eyes sees it differently. Very differently this time.

“None of the papers had the same man of the match and, in some cases, the player ratings were completely opposite from one paper to another. Yet we all are talking about the same game. So who is telling the truth, then? Probably everyone and no one. It is just a matter of opinion.”

Dangoumau listens to that story and smiles.

“There are several (current players) who could do that,” he says. “Adil Rami has the personality to do it. If a player gives a journalist a ranking, as long as there’s no ridicule or dishonesty, why not? As journalists, we receive this kind of criticism of our work. With online media, we have a taste of that with our readers’ comments on articles.”

With tongue ever so slightly in cheek, Riihilahti also wrote in his Times column that “it is unbelievable how many multi-talented people have chosen to be journalists. Not just writing a story from a game, journalists are also good enough to evaluate 22 players during 90 minutes”.

If only that were true.

By and large, player ratings are viewed by football writers as a nightmare, and for the very reason that Riihilahti said.

Realistically, can anyone be expected to watch a game, file a match report that’s hundreds of words long (or more) the moment the final whistle blows and give an accurate assessment of the contributions of everyone who played?

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“To have an opinion on 22 players, it’s quite complicated,” adds Dangoumau, who says that L’Equipe will have up to three reporters rating the players when the France national team is in action. “They’re (the ratings) not an absolute truth, even if you watch one player for 90 minutes. There are limits which you have to accept.”

A journalist risks upsetting more than one individual with what is perceived to be an unfair rating. Russell Kempson wrote a Euro 2004 diary piece while covering the tournament for The Times and painted a picture of what it was like to find himself in the line of fire after giving England’s Ashley Cole a low mark for his performance against Portugal in the quarter-finals.

“Awake to hear four-out-of-10 mark for Ashley Cole has caused uproar in Wapping (where The Times’ offices were). The readers are revolting. Also get roasting from Rodney Marsh on Sky Sports but he, too, appears not to comprehend early copy deadlines, well before end of 90 minutes, or lack of time for updates. Wonder what the punters thought of Cole mark of three in Daily Mail, whose correspondent was sitting next to me? Or one paper giving David James nine, another four?”

From a reporter’s point of view, ratings become trickier still when a comment is required about each player as well as a mark out of 10 — something that the Premier League player who spoke earlier in this article brought up during our conversation and referenced with a mixture of bafflement and bemusement.

“That little snippet, or tiny paragraph, on the player’s analysis, takes out just one single action of the game. If you were a full-back, and a winger maybe roasted you once, but did it with a lovely trick, they could hang it on that and think, ‘There’s my analysis for the right-back that day’. They would write, ‘Had a sticky moment in the first half but otherwise came through unscathed’. It’s a 90-minute game but that’s the kind of analysis you get (in player ratings).”

It was impossible not to smile as he made that remark, partly because it is exactly the kind of thing that I could imagine typing in a panic in the past after getting to the 85th minute, worrying about an unfinished match report that has to be filed on the whistle, and noticing that I still haven’t written anything next to the name of one of the right-backs in the player ratings.

The reality is that, even without the distraction of working at a game, people will always come to entirely different conclusions about how a player performed. Part of that could be due to preconceptions among supporters about a particular individual or just the fact that we all see games through a slightly different lens and attach more or less importance to certain actions on the pitch.

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“What does it mean for a player to have a good match?” Dangoumau asks. “What’s a good match for a wing-back? Does he have to just defend or attack as well? An attacker who scores two goals but misses five chances – did he have a good game?

“It’s a discussion that could go on for hours and we’d never agree. The ratings generate that debate and that’s why it’s so popular, because everyone has an opinion — especially in football.”

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